He watched the asteroid fall. He watched them end.
The ice ages came and went. The continents drifted, collided, split again. The first flowers bloomed, an absurd botanical revolution that rewrote the entire ecology of the planet in a few million years. The first birds sang songs no one was there to hear. Mammals, tiny and nocturnal at first, began their quiet, patient inheritance of the post-dinosaur world.
And through all of it, under all of it, the mana threads. Shining faintly in everything. Wound through the DNA of every cell. Threaded through the stones. Braided into the atmosphere.
The same filaments he had seen between the stars, now woven through a single planet's biosphere, tying every living thing into one luminous web that no one living on the planet seemed able to see.
